Mourning This Innocent Child's Horrible Life

December 07, 1995|By Joan Beck.

Elisa Izquierdo made the cover of Time magazine this week, an enchanting, beautiful six year old dead at the hands of her demented mother, her casket piled with flowers and teddy bears and troubled questions.

Critics of proposed budget cuts are ready to make Elisa their poster child, to charge that hundreds more little children will die and thousands more young lives will be endangered if welfare services shrink and caseworkers' loads get bigger.

That's probably true. But the problem isn't just money. One reason more than 1,000 children die from abuse every year in the U.S.--and almost 3 million incidents of maltreatment are reported--is that state and federal laws and social work policies too often keep youngsters in dangerous situations in the interests of uniting families.

Elisa's hauntingly tragic story is full of caring efforts to help her, of people who knew she was being abused and tried to rescue her. They failed not only because caseworkers did not take adequate action, but because the legal system kept turning the little girl with the beguiling smile and the sparkling eyes back to the mother who tortured and beat her.

Even from her birth in 1989, New York's Child Welfare Administration knew Elisa was in jeopardy. She was born addicted to crack. Her mother, Awilda Lopez, was an addict with two other children who met Elisa's father, Cuban immigrant Gustavo Izquierdo, at a homeless shelter where he worked and she sought help when she lost her apartment.

Hospital social workers refused to give the crack-racked newborn to her mother and arranged for custody to go to Izquierdo, who was a loving, wonderful father. He took parenting classes and enrolled Elisa in a Montessori school at the local YWCA where her charm and radiance captivated the staff--and one of its patrons, Prince Michael of the old Greek royalty.

When Izquierdo could not continue to pay tuition bills, Prince Michael promised to provide for Elisa's private schooling through 12th grade.

But there was to be no happy future for Elisa. In 1991, her mother asked for and got unsupervised visits with Elisa every other weekend. Social workers said Awilda had gotten off drugs and married Carlos Lopez, a maintenance worker. Neighbors reported hearing sounds of violence from their apartment.

Elisa told her father and her teachers that her mother hit her and hurt her and she did not want to have to see her any more. Her bruises were obvious. There were injuries in her vaginal area. And she was showing classic signs of child abuse. Elisa's teachers reported their concerns to a child-abuse hotline.

Izquierdo asked the court to deny Awilda visitation rights. But the court delayed acting and in May, 1994, Izquierdo died of lung cancer. His cousin petitioned for custody of Elisa. But with help from the Legal Aid Society, the CWA and Project Chance, a federally funded parenting program for the poor, Awilda won custody of her daughter.

Awilda put Elisa into a Manhattan public school, where teachers and staff also noticed her injuries and reported them to CWA. Nothing was done. Neighbors said Carlos and Awilda were using drugs and they frequently heard Elisa screaming "Mommy, please stop. I'm sorry." It turned out she was being beaten and sexually abused with a hairbrush.

On Nov. 22, Elisa was found dead, with cuts and bruises all over her body. Police said it was the worst case of child abuse they had ever seen. Awilda told them she had thrown Elisa against a concrete wall, bashing in her head. She also said she had made the child eat her own feces and mopped the floor with her head. Elisa, she said, was possessed by the devil and she was trying to drive the evil away.

There's plenty of blame to go around in this horrible case. Because Elisa was a victim of not only of the child welfare system's failures but of its good intentions at family reunification, we must think long and hard about changing some of those policies.

In theory, the answer to situations like Awilda Lopez is massive assistance--drug rehabilitation, welfare, job training, parenting education, day care, abuse counseling, treatment for mental illness, a homemaker to run the household and watch the children.

But even if this were financially possible, there are no assurances it would work. The number of abused and neglected children is growing, due in part to more use of illegal drugs. At the same time, budget cutbacks are forcing social workers, who are usually overworked, underpaid and inadequately trained, to take even bigger case loads.

The foster care system, which in theory provides a loving place for children while their biological parents get their lives in order, doesn't work as well in practice as in theory. Too often children get lost in foster care limbo, never able to return to their own parents, never having a home to call their own.

So we should rethink the family reunification bias in state and federal laws and in social work practice. And we should terminate parental rights more quickly.

We should consider using adoption as a permanent--and cost-saving--solution for many children, especially the youngest ones. Certainly there are hundreds of thousands of families who would adopt an Elisa if the law would make the best interest of children the decisive factor in custody rulings.

There are legitimate concerns about using the awesome power of the state to take children away from their biological parents. State and federal laws which now stress family reunification would have to be modified. But remembering Elisa should make it easier.